English II Pre-AP 2010-2011
--The most up-to-date version of this assignment can be downloaded at the bottom of the page.
Summer Reading Assignment
Dear Students, Welcome to English II Pre-AP! One of the primary concerns of this course is the world around us, and how we make sense of it. While we will study literature from many eras, we will begin by thinking about modern issues in the world around us. To aid us in this process, we will begin by reading a memoir about one boy’s experiences in war-torn Sierra Leone during the 1990s. (A memoir is a kind of nonfiction in which an author tells stories from his or her life.) Here is your assignment:
- Purchase or borrow a copy of Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. Plenty of copies can be found at the Westlake Barnes and Noble, but you may also try a discount book store such as Half-Price Books. You may also borrow a copy from students who were in English II Pre-AP last year.
- Purchase a composition notebook or a single subject spiral notebook. This will be your Writer’s Notebook for the 2010-2011 school year. Feel free to choose a design that appeals to you. You may decorate or embellish the notebook if you like.
- As you read A Long Way Gone, pay attention to the development of themes--how the same ideas seem to keep coming up in different ways. You will notice several themes running through the text, such as:
- Storytelling
- Journey
- Music
- Memory
- Write three journal entries--you may do these on loose paper or on the computer. Here's what should be in each entry:
- Choose three passages which seem thematically related. Divide a page vertically, creating two columns.
- On the left, copy the three passages you have chosen.
- On the right, write a response explaining:
- How the three passages seem to be talking about the same main idea or theme.
- How the idea is treated in each passage (using at least one quotation from each)
- How the theme relates to you or to the world around you. (Here you are welcome to bring up other books you have read which seem related.)
Assessment These journal entries will count as a significant grade for the first six weeks of school. You are welcome to read with friends and discuss the book, but you should choose passages and write journal responses on your own. If you have any questions, please feel free to send us an email--we'll be all over the country this summer, but we'll probably get back to you within a week. Sophomore year is going to be great. -Kristy Robins, John Campbell, Jon Watson, and Chris Proctor krobins@eanesisd.net jcampbell@eanesisd.net jwatson2@eanesisd.net cproctor@eanesisd.net
Model Journal Entry
This is a model of what your journal might look like if you were reading To Kill a Mockingbird. Thanks to the Junior AP teachers for creating this model.
| Quotations | Response |
| “Inside the house lived a malevolent phantom. People said he existed, but Jem and I had never seen him. People said he went out at night when the moon was down and peeped in windows. When people’s azaleas froze in a cold snap, it was because he had breathed on them. Any stealthy small crimes committed in Maycomb were his work” (8-9). “‘Jack! When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness’ sake. But don’t make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles ’em. No,’ my father mused, ‘you had the right answer this afternoon, but the wrong reasons. Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they’re not attracting attention with it. Hotheadedness isn’t. Scout’s got to learn to keep her head and learn soon, with what’s in store for her these next few months’” (87). “‘I say guilt, gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She has committed no crime, she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance, but I cannot pity her: she is white. She knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it’” (203). | One theme present in To Kill a Mockingbird underlies many of the relationships in the book: a theme of stereotypying others based on some label. In the first excerpt, Boo Radley is identified as a “malevolent phantom” because people cannot understand his difference from them, his lack of social contact. In the second excerpt, Jack assumes that because Scout is a child, she must be dealt with in a certain way, and Atticus, although recognizing that Scout is a child, realizes that bigger issues are involved than just her use of language. In the third excerpt, Atticus speaks in the courtroom about the “codes” of their society, codes that keep Mayella Ewell from being able to deal honestly with her feelings for Tom Robinson, and that allow a group of jurors to convict Tom even though he committed no crime. All of these examples point to the idea that often our judgments of people are based on stereotypes rather than on actually understanding people’s individual motivations and actions. Although it would be nice to believe that such judgments are a thing of the past (a time such as the setting of To Kill a Mockingbird), the reality is that these same kinds of stereotypes and judgments happen today as well when we think that just because a person lives in a certain part of the city or just because a person has a certain ethnic background, he must be a certain type of person. How different the world might be if, instead of assessing a person’s worth based on whether he is unlike us in demeanor, age, wealth, race, or some other way, we got to know people and tried to understand who they are. This seems to me to be a major theme of this novel because, as Atticus says, we must and we can learn to walk around in another’s skin, to look at the world through another’s eyes, if only we take time to learn about them before we begin to make judgments about their worth or their views. |
Why
What are we trying to do in the beginning of the year?
- Assess what students should already be able to do:
- Respond to text with text-to-self, text-to-world, and text-to-text connections.
- Explain the presence of overarching themes in particular passages.
- Use textual evidence to justify a claim
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Summer Reading 10-11.doc | 36.5 KB |